The first Cassandra Voices Podcast, hosted by Luke Sheahan, features a long form interview with the veteran journalist Patrick Cockburn. Patrick’s father Claud, a leading British Communist member and journalist fought in the Spanish Civil War and eventually settled in Ireland. Patrick says of his father:
He used to say the big battalion commanders want to convince the small battalions, the weaker, the less wealthy that there’s absolutely no point in resisting the big powers, they might as well give up. Claude believed exactly the opposite, the big powers are always more fragile, that they had points of vulnerability and you can attack them, and that’s why I have just published this book, which will be published later this year which is a biography of my father which is called Believe Nothing Until it is Officially Denied.’
Following in his father’s footsteps, for fifty years Patrick Cockburn has been practicing the art of journalism with integrity and persistence: a specialist on the Middle East, he has written extensively on wars and political machinations from Beirut to Belfast and Baghdad.
Within books like The Occupation and Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession (2002) (written with his brother Andrew), Patrick Cockburn has revealed the workings of Arab dictatorships and Western Imperialism alike. Over the last decade, he has also created a separate, no less distinguished profile as a memoirist: The Broken Boy (2022) describes his survival of a Polio epidemic in 1950s Cork, while Henry’s Demons (2011) co-authored with his son, immerses the reader into the pain of psychosis.
For our conversation with Patrick Cockburn, we sought to sketch out the lives and work of two independent-minded writers: both himself and his father, Claud. As indicated, Claud’s fifty-year career brought him around the world, from Civil War Spain to Wall Street during the crash of 1929, back to 1930s London, where his newsletter The Week both documented and fought the rise of Fascism. It was only after WW2 that Claud moved to Ireland, where Patrick and his siblings would be born from the 50s onwards.
Making use of unclassified MI5 files, and an abundance of material directly remembered from his late father, Patrick spoke to Cassandra Voices as he was preparing the final manuscript of a new memoir, covering Claud’s life.
Patrick also spoke out passionately about coverage of the war in Gaza:
Evil becomes normalised … and a lot of the governments don’t want to recognise and the papers and those outlets that support the governments don’t want to go on about it. So it’s perfectly reasonable that we should have a big story about the Russians firing some rockets into a city in Ukraine and half a dozen people are killed and others injured. That is wrong and that gets a lot of publicity. Then several hundred people are killed in Gaza and that’s on the bottom of the page now, if it’s mentioned at all.
The first part of the podcast is freely available. You can listen to part two by subscribing on Apple podcasts. We will also be sending the second half of the show to our loyal Patreon supporters in the next few days. The decision to charge for the second half comes from our determination to maintain our independence.
The colourful humourist and English poet laureate, Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984) is the subject of Dominic Moseley’s Betjeman in Ireland (Somerville Press, 2023), which is lavishly illustrated with photographs.
Betjeman, who took his teddy bear, Alfie with him to Oxford in 1925 was the inspiration for the character of Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Posted to Dublin as press attaché in the British Embassy during World War II from early 1941 to autumn 1943, his love affair with Ireland had begun two decades earlier in Oxford. There he met, and had a unique affinity with, the remnants of the Irish Ascendancy in all their fading glory. Chief among them was Edward Pakenham, 6th Earl of Longford who lived in what is now, Tullynally Castle in Co. Westmeath. It was Pakenham who first brought Betjeman to Ireland in 1925.
An unapologetic social climber, Betjeman was the son of a furniture manufacturer from North London. Yet he was often ridiculed for his remorseless snobbery and his upwardly mobile pursuits. He finally enrolled in Magdalen College, Oxford after some difficulty in 1925, and it was in Oxford he met influential people such as C.S. Lewis and Maurice Bowra and Evelyn Waugh but also members of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy who held a unique charm for him and with whom he formed a special bond. Indeed, his road to social success seems to have been through the back door of the Irish Ascendancy.
Betjeman nourished an abiding fascination with Ireland from his Oxford days, especially the Irish Aristocracy – the more eccentric the better. He declared his ‘particular’ fondness for ‘people who had gone to seed’.
Others in the roll call of Betjeman’s Irish friends were Lord Rosse of Birr Castle, Basil Ava of Clandeboy House, Co Down Northern Ireland. His life-long love affair with Ireland was cemented in 1951 when, aged forty-six, he met the twenty-year-old Elizabeth Cavendish of Lismore Castle, who became his lifelong mistress and muse, causing occasional, great misery to his aristocratic wife Penelope.
It was through such aristocrats that Betjeman got his first taste of Ireland and when he arrived in Dublin as press attaché in 1941, whereupon he immersed himself further into that circle. Described affectionately by Moseley as ‘an ambitious social alpinist’ who ‘dearly loved a lord and lady’ he shamelessly cultivated them. Indeed, his enthusiasm for the Irish upper crust bordered on sycophantic.
Moseley chronicles an awesome litany of love affairs, flirtations and dalliances indulged in by Betjeman. But this larger than life, affable, and energetic figure could still say, incredibly, in later life that the one regret he had was not ‘having had more sex.’
It was possibly because of Betjeman’s popularity among Ireland’s Ascendancy he was chosen as press attaché. He soon became an instant hit among the literati of the Palace Bar, on Fleet Street in Dublin. This helped fulfil his mission ‘to ameliorate the anti-Irish tone of British press and to dilute the anti-English sentiments of the Irish press.’
In the Palace Bar the influential editor of the Irish Times, RM Smyllie ‘held court’ among a wide audience. Betjeman charmed a formidable array of artists and writers such as Sean O’Faolain, Frank O’Connor, Brinsley MacNamara, Flann O’Brien, Patrick Kavanagh, Austin Clarke, Terence de Vere White, Maurice Craig, Cyril Cusack and numerous others from the world of literature who also wielded a lot of influence.
He was no less popular among the artists he befriended such as, Paul Henry, Jack B. Yeats, Harry Kernoff, Sean O’Sullivan and numerous others. This group was ‘the locus of soft power’ in Ireland and once Betjeman was accepted and esteemed in this circle his success in Ireland was assured.
Portrait of Seán Ó Faoláin by Howard Coster, 1930’s
Ireland could easily have become a strong ally for Germany against Britain. Betjeman had ‘stepped into a historical minefield with little resources except his natural affability’. He certainly seems to have had a major diplomatic impact, and his friendship with the writer, Elizabeth Bowen – herself working for the British Ministry of Information and an on-off lover of Sean O’Faolain – was sure to have helped Betjeman.
It was Betjeman’s easy charm, wit and affability that made him a huge success in Ireland and his encounters with the Irish politicians of the day, including Éamon de Valera were very successful too: he had a sympathy with the problems posed by partition in the North, but this did not prevent the IRA classifying him, for a time, as a person of ‘menace’, although the plot to assassinated him was later dropped.
In 1942, he used his influence to get the English Horizon literary and artistic magazine to do an Irish number, featuring among others, Sean O’Faolain, Frank O’Connor, Patrick Kavanagh and Jack B Yeats.
What this entertaining page turner underscores is that John Betjeman was first and foremost a gifted poet who ‘celebrated every aspect of the idea of love’ and was especially ‘a poet of place whether it be the home counties, Oxford, Ireland or his beloved Cornwall.’
Unsurprisingly, he had a particular affinity with, and admiration for, Patrick Kavanagh where a sense of place is always foremost in the latter’s poems.
A major early influence was Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village.’ Betjeman’s passion for place, for architecture, for locations, for churches and old ruins saturates his poems and this is very much the case regarding his most celebrated Irish poem ‘Ireland With Emily’ where place fuses with his unrequited passion for Emily Hemphill of Tulira Castle in Galway (later to become Emily Villiers-Stuart of Dromana House, Waterford). It is one of his finest and most evocative poems about Ireland.
Betjeman’s passion for architecture flourished in Ireland too and his love of stately houses often outstripped his passion for their occupants, albeit he later wondered ‘how many linen sheets in the houses of Ireland received his lustful limbs.’ The combination of place with the erotic in his poems is described as a ‘potent brew’.
He waxed erotically about Furness House, Kildare, Shelton Abbey, Wicklow, Woodbrook House, Portarlington, Pakenham Hall, Westmeath and numerous others. Betjeman even learned the Irish language and frequently signed himself Sean O’Betjemán. His heart-rending Irish poem ‘A Lament for Moira McCavendish’ is another fine example of how place and love conflates in a way unique to Betjeman.
He might, as the author suggest, ‘have by his association with Elizabeth Cavendish, ascended to the highest rung’ socially but the portrait that emerges in this book is of a complex, flawed but likeable, warm human being with a large-hearted humanity and a unique generosity of spirit. It was that quality that made him the perfect diplomat in Ireland at the time.
A devout Anglican who feared the afterlife he emerges as the most loveable of ‘sinners’ in this book. His ‘Ballad of the Small Town in Ireland’ is likened to a Thomas Moore melody in which he celebrates the ordinary life of fair days, burned barracks, elegant squares, neglected graves, ruined churches and court houses.
Above all, Betjeman’s pre-eminence as a poet of merit is vigorously reclaimed in this study. The author notes how the ‘Modernism’ in poetry championed by T.S. Eliot and E.E. Cummings paved the way for an, often ‘graceless poetry devoid of scansion, rhyme, metre and original thought’.
As a traditionalist Betjeman is often dismissed as a ‘trite poet’ and, lamentably, does not feature today on school and college syllabi. None of this takes from the fact that his Collected Poems sold over two million copies and that when he died in 1984, he had been England’s poet laureate for twelve years, from 1972.
This book is not just an inspirational, charming and entertaining account of Beckett’s time in, and life-long love affair with, Ireland but it is a passionate command to restore him as a major poet of the English language.
Betjeman In Ireland by Dominic Moseley is published in paperback by Somerville Press and costs €15.
We are living in a time when there are no gentlemen.
So, women stand for hours without being offered any seats.
It’ s a privilege which they have laboured for and for centuries,
It appears! Madness, I know, but you must respect them.
As you watch their small fists tightening on the headrests,
And the veins on their slight wrists seeming to almost split…
That is just at the point when you must resist to offer them a seat
And rather plant your own arse further into it!
As I have said before, we are living in a time without any gentlemen
And highly vocal women, who apparently know exactly what they want.
The children are so dissolute you could be forgiven for not showing!
Resist, resist, resist! Resistance, apparently is the source of all Art.
Resist recapitulating altogether. And whatever you do,
Don’t Fart!
This week Cassandra Voices editor Frank Armstrong sat down for a chat with veteran Italian journalist Concetto La Malfa, who has been living in Ireland for almost sixty years.
He initially arrived for a two month work placement with Aer Lingus, before embarking on a chequered career that includes founding a magazine for the Italian community, which he edited for almost thirty years, acting as the Irish correspondent for the Corriere dello Sport, and teaching Italian in UCD.
He continues to work as a journalist, principally throught the site he runs: http://italvideonewstv.net/, where he mainly broadcasts short videos discussing important international events.
Concetto explains how he came to Ireland at a time when the country was still relatively poor, and he says, a little depressing, compared to his native Sicily at least. At that time, Dublin was he says: “a poor capital in a poor country”.
Indeed, he was slightly disturbed to find that there were only five Italian restaurants – four run by the same brothers – and he struggled to adapt to the Irish lifestyle, missing his native cuisine in particular.
Since then, Ireland has developed considerably, economically at least, although Concetto likens the country to a dwarf with a giant heart, given the disproportionate size of Dublin’s c. 1.5 million population compared to the c. 3.5 million in the rest of the country.
Dublin he argues, ‘is a capital city that has grown in a hurry’ and that many things should work better, pointing to the state of the streets and, in particular, the prevalence of street crime.
In terms of Sicily, he asserts that the mafia is as visible as the IRA was to the ordinary Joe Soap in Ireland. Although he acknowledges that organised crime has has hindered development on the island.
He keeps away from the intricacies of Italian politics, preferring to concentrate on the big picture, but cites a telling statistic that there have been 67 governments in just 74 years. He wonders whether this is a sign of a democracy that goes too far.
During his period as correspondent for Corriera dello Sport he became acquainted with Giovanni Trappatoni and Liam Brady, who spent seven seasons in Italy playing for Juventus and Inter Milan.
Finally, Concetto has formed the view that the West is conducting a war by proxy in Ukraine, with the blood of the Ukrainian people, and that every single weapon sent from the West makes the possibility of a diplomatic resolution more distant.
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Over the past few years, a broad consensus has emerged that in Ireland providing adequate protections for whistleblowing, and whistleblowers, is a lot more difficult to achieve in practice than in theory.
In many fields, extreme real life consequences for a brave decision to go public with revelations of wrongdoing have been apparent. The protections currently in place do not shield individuals from repercussions in one’s personal and family life, or career. We are talking about losing a job, harassment, unwanted public exposure, grave false allegations and framing, protracted legal challenges, financial difficulties to name but a few. All too often, such individuals are dismissed as ‘rats’. There follow death threats and even the potential for imprisonment. At any level such a decision is a life-changing event. In many cases it is traumatic.
There are many examples: Garda John Wilson and Maurice McCabe’s ordeals are well recounted in a RTE in a documentary. Back in 2017, banking whistleblower Jonathan Sugarman testified to the Oireachtas that: “Official Ireland has absolutely and completely destroyed the lives of every single whistleblower who has come forward, from whatever walk of life they’ve come.”
Many others have come forward to expose misconduct they witness emanating from so-called ‘official Ireland,’ a term that broadly signifies the nexus of the Irish ruling class’s power, across the public and private sector. It is fair to say, as sources have revealed, that there were, and possibly are, many more people who feel unable to go down the whistleblowing path.
Notwithstanding the Protected Disclosures Act 2014, the law should better regulate whistleblower disclosures and their protection, and encourage people to step forward when they witness wrongdoing.
Even now in 2021, after much debate and revelations, and with Irish whistleblowing legislation being under the process of amendment in compliance with the EU Directive 2019/1937, it is alleged that a culture of ostracizing whistleblowers persists in the civil service, Garda, as well financial and other corporate institutions.
If the legislation is there to protect individuals, why then, are some, or many unwilling to proceed? Why is it that after long pondering, and perhaps after seeking confidential advice from a lawyer or union, they find themselves unable to proceed with a disclosure?
And what can the whistleblower expect to endure after making the brave decision? More to the point, does the proposed new legislation offer adequate protect form the extensive tentacles of ‘official Ireland’?
I posed these questions to human rights barrister David Langwallner, who was asked by Sinn Féin to help draft a private member’s bill which they propose to introduce to Dáil Éireann by July 31st, 2021.
Daneiel Idini (DI): David, can I ask you what’s happening these days with regard to whistleblowing in Ireland?
David Langwallner (DL): What happened was and I’ve got to be a bit circumspect about this. I was approached by a former client of mine who’s a whistleblower, and that client indicated that the Oireachtas was about to introduce, in compliance with EU law, a newly amended protected disclosure legislation to pass in 2021. There is an existing Protected Disclosures Act 2014. But certain deficiencies were pointed out to me by the Sinn Fein party. I had a meeting with them, they’ve asked me to draft a private member’s bill that they propose to introduce by July 31th 2021, first because of perceived and actual deficiencies in the existing whistleblowing bill.
DI: How long have you been dealing with the issue of whistleblowing concerning Ireland?
DL: I have represented whistleblowers [in the inquiry into a bank inquiry.] I continue to represent Garda whistleblowers and corporate whistleblowers. I lectured for one semester whistleblowing, at Middlesex University and I have gathered extensive materials.
DI: You have also written two articles, one in the Village magazine and one in broadsheets on the pitfalls of whistleblowing. And tell me what exactly is wrong with Ireland’s handling of whistleblowing.
DL: I think a number of things. The first thing is that the new proposed act is seeking to introduce private whistleblower regulation. The real problem in Ireland is state corruption. So you need regulation for whistleblowing and provisions that deal with whistleblowers in the Police; whistleblowers in the Department of Civil Service; whistleblowers within the structure of inquiries; whistleblowers within the structure of the public health system; and indeed the prison service and the present bill does not address that fully.
DI: Is that because of the fact the whistleblower is forced to refer to the top of the organization that he is trying to blow the whistle on?
DL: So that is that deficiency, I suppose. But the other deficiencies, documents, and literature suggest that there is no point in having a structure where a whistleblower is subject to the necessity to follow internal procedures before they (feel safe) to go externally.
The reason for this is that when internal procedures are usually invoked, there’s the risk that bullies, submission, demonization, can ostracize the whistleblower.
The first recipients of the disclosure are usually the very people who want cover-up in the first place. And in a culture like Ireland’s one, there are very few independent people who take this seriously.
So a whistleblower has to do a job. He has to be able to circumvent the internal processes and procedures of the corporate or public organization that they’re in.
And that means a whistleblower has to be allowed to go outside that organization, to the press, for example. But the difficulty that we face in this Irish media context though, is that there is very little investigative press, anymore, who are not controlled by the established parties. The same parties are concealing all the levels of misconduct and wrongdoing.
DI: So can you tell me in a nutshell in a few minutes exactly what the current legislation covers and if it tackles this “Culture” of antagonism towards whistleblowing?
DL: Well, the current legislation covers things like criminal wrongdoing, corruption, bad financial administration, miscarriages of justice. It’s extensive to that extent. But the problem is that it doesn’t matter how extensive the coverage is in terms of protection If the culture is not receptive to whistleblowing.
So, the person I represented to the inquiry into whistleblowing and audit the second day of the case,(the first effective third case,) the police got wind of this and they threatened the breach of the Official Secrets Act. So to intimidate to not go ahead. So even if you’ve got a culture of bullying, harassment, and intimidation, you could also, at the same time have, like the Soviets, a fabulous constitution that protected every right under the sun but it was utterly meaningless in practical terms.
You could have a whistle-blowing statute that protects everything, but not when organizations such as the Department of Justice, Police, corrupt politicians get involved. I think what we need to do is create a more receptive culture. It means creating an independent ombudsman, allowing for external reportage.
DI: Can you give me an example of what is the path that he has to follow to effectively become a whistleblower and therefore denounce what he saw?
DL: Well say, for example, a senior police officer who sees that the police are actively framing people for child sex abuse, for example. The process of complaint in that particular context is that the police officer in question would have to make an internal complaint within the police. And those at the top police force were part of corruption.
DI: Are you saying that there should be more protections for someone who makes the disclosure directly to an external, independent first recipient. Someone or a body that is not in the organization involved by the whistleblower disclosures?
DL: There can be no barrier, statutorily, to someone going to an external body or agency or the press, having to have exhausted internal procedures. As they have to go through the hoops of internal procedures, those procedures would try to demonize and diminish them and have a vested interest.
So you have to go first internally, and then go to an ombudsman, before you go to the press or external body.
I think in conjunction with the whistleblower allegation, we need to build in a procedure where the whistleblower is almost immediately protected, and that I mean that there must be a party to go to that can give them a income structure if there were suspended from work, so that they don’t have to interact with people who are blowing the whistle on the workplace. The lack of such support is inherent in our culture of compliance, which is so amazing.
For the purpose of clarification, I had further conversations with David on the last points touched on in the above interview as to the psychological impact that a whistleblower faces. If not properly addressed with, for example, access to therapeutic psychological support, as well as other forms of protection, even more stigmatization may be the result.
I also discussed with him, as well as with other sources, that currently wish to remain anonymous, the procedures for disclosure that are in place for whistleblowers to use. It’s pretty obvious that internal procedures of disclosures, in some cases, can be painful as well as inefficient for all the reasons discussed above. But are alternatives offered, for example the Garda Ombudsman with regard to complaints about Gardai, allowing for the full protection available under the Act? And is the compensation scheme adequate, or should this include aggravated and exemplary damages?
Should the protections, and possible compensation, also include redress to family members of whistleblowers, who might have suffered the consequence of this “culture”.
We will continue to ask these and other questions, but in the meantime, there remains one important question for me to ask which is: has Ireland got any better for whistleblowing, after years of revelations, media coverage, and resignations; or are things pretty much as they always were, if not worse?
We’ve lost Fionn and his Fianna, the stories that were told for hundreds, thousands of generations by firesides in Ireland and Scotland. Our language gone from us, and with it these science-fiction-like stories have drained away.
This was Ireland’s Dreamtime, our golden age, the perfection of time and place that we long for, we remember, we memorialise, we identify with, we idolize.
All of the important names of these idols of the Fiannaíocht relate to deer. Fia is a deer in Irish, a fianna is a deer herd; Fionn, named for his white-blond hair, was originally Deimne, a fawn; the name of his magically-acquired wife, Sadhbh, means a doe, and Oisín and Oscar, his son and grandson, are both words for young male deer.
Both Sadbh and Oisín came to Fionn in deer form – they were hunted down by the Fianna’s hounds, but defended from the hunting-pack by the enchanted superdogs Bran and Sceolan.
Tír na nÓg
The Fianna and their wit and prowess are part of the language – of our lost language in Ireland. To someone arriving late and bewildered we used to say they were “Oisín i ndhiadh na Féinne” – Oisín long after the Fianna, searching hopelessly for them. It’s a saying that came from the story of Oisín, lured to the land of youth, Tír na nÓg, by a seductive blonde on a white horse; he comes home for a visit and finds himself crumbling into a man of three hundred years old as soon as his foot touches the soil of Ireland.
Ossian playing his harp, by François Pascal Simon Gérard, 1801.
For equality we said cothrom na Féinne, the equality of the Fianna, because equal shares and equal respect were their watchword. Even our picnics and barbecues were fulacht fia, the word coming from the ancient method of pit cookery. We said “Dar fia!” for “by Jove!” Our ancient board game was fiachall, played with pieces called fia. It’s not for nothing that our national anthem starts “Sinn na Fíanna Fáil”, identifying us as Destiny’s deer.
All of the stories might be medieval fanfic; or they might have been written by monks schooled through childhood in the oral tradition, who took their chance to undercut the Christianity from which they were now making a nasty, brutish and short living. Or they might be ancient béaloideas given written form by those transgressive monks. Wherever they come from, their echo rings out from our hearts.
Fionn mac Cumhaill
Fionn, the leader of the Fianna, started his life, as did many heroes in stories everywhere in the world, hidden from those who had killed his family and were hunting for him. Brought up by poet aunts deep in the woods of Slieve Bloom, he sallied out and became the leader of the royal guard that included his father’s killers.
In between battles and contests, hunts and hero-deeds the Fianna loved to sit around on mountain-tops composing poetry. In one of the beloved stories of these poem-contests, one of the lads asked what was everyone’s favourite sound. The pretty boy Diarmuid said it was the cries of women in love; Oisín said it was a cuckoo calling from a hedge; Oscar, the sound of a spear on a shield. Then they asked Fionn, and he said the best music in the world was “the music of what happens”.
But back to the dogs. The Fianna’s dogs were central to their stories, and especially Bran and her brother Sceolan: “We went westward one time to hunt at Formaid of the Fianna [aka Ballyfermot], to see the first running of our hounds.”
These are the words of Fionn Mac Cumhaill’s son Oisín, a few days earlier a buff young man in his prime, now suddenly three hundred years old and feeling it.
Lady Gregory
“It was Fionn was holding Bran, and it is with myself Sceolan was; Diarmuid of the Women had Fearan, and Oscar had lucky Adhnuall,” he says, in Lady Gregory’s translation of the debate between the the two ill-tempered old gentlemen, St Patrick and Oisin, in her book Gods and Fighting Men.[i]
“Conan the Bald had Searc; Caoilte, son of Ronan, had Daol; Lugaidh’s Son and Goll were holding Fuaim and Fothran.
“That was the first day we loosed out a share of our hounds to a hunting; and Och! Patrick, of all that were in it, there is not one left living but myself.”
Oisín had landed back from his Tír na nÓg love nest and gone around Ireland looking for his family and friends. Everyone he met told him these were people from a myth, or had lived hundreds of years ago. He was at the south end of Glenasmole, in the Dublin Mountains, when he went to help some puny little fellows who were trying to shift a boulder out of the way of a road they were building. The girth of his horse broke and he got a shocking land, his burden of years coming on him in a moment. St Patrick took him in, in the hope of bringing him to the Christian way of thinking. But they had one big problem with each other: their attitude to dogs.
“Fionn, the son of Uail, delighted in dogs,” wrote James Stephens in one of the best children’s books ever written, Irish Fairy Tales[ii], a reworking of the Fiannaíocht stories. “And he knew everything about them from the setting of the first little white tooth to the rocking of the last long yellow one. He knew the affections and antipathies which are proper in a dog; the degree of obedience to which dogs may be trained without losing their honourable qualities or becoming servile and suspicious; he knew the hopes that animate them, the apprehensions which tingle in their blood, and all that is to be demanded from, or forgiven in, a paw, an ear, a nose, an eye, or a tooth; and he understood these things because he loved dogs, for it is by love alone that we understand anything.”
Fairy Child
John Duncan ‘Riders of Sidhe’
Fionn was the son of Uail Mac Baiscne. He was, in the way of mythic heroes, also a child of the Sidhe; his mother, Muirne, was the granddaughter of Nuadha Airgeadlámh, the Tuatha de Danann’s silver-handed king.
Fionn was also – in one of those family problems we don’t talk about – a cousin of his dogs Bran and Sceolan. Fionn’s mother’s sister, Tuiren, made the mistake of falling for and marrying Iollan, a man of the Sidhe, but Iollan’s old partner, Uct Dealv, took grave exception to his marriage.
She kidnapped Tuiren and turned her into a bitch, as you do, and handed her over to Fergus Fionnlaith, the man in Ireland who most disliked dogs. However, Tuiren’s charms were just as powerful in doggy as in human form, and Fergus was soon as besotted as anyone with a new puppy.
Fionn tracked down his auntie and disenchanted her, but in the meantime she’d had two pups which remained in dog form, and were Old Irish superhero dogs – Bran and Sceolan.
Bran, whose name meant ‘raven’ was the kind of dog we nowadays call a merle. “Speckled back over the loins; two ears scarlet, equal-red… Yellow feet that were on Bran, two black sides and belly white, greyish back of hunting colour,” as Douglas Hyde translated the bitch’s description in his collection Beside the Fireside, adding “Bran would overtake the wild geese, she was that swift.”[iii]
Some 1,969 years later, Led Zeppelin underlined this good taste, singing, “You can tell all your friends around the world, ain’t no companion like a blue-eyed merle.”[iv]
Heaven Awaits
As Oisín debated with the newfangled patron saint of Ireland, he was enraged by Patrick’s insistence that his beloved dogs would not go to heaven, a place Patrick was bigging up.
The leap of the buck would be better to me, or the sight of badgers between two valleys, than all your mouth is promising me, and all the delights I could get in Heaven,” he says snarkily. “Fionn never refused strong or poor, although cold Hell is now his dwelling place.
Patrick tells him he’s a withered, witless old man, and what’s more, the Fianna are all in Hell.
“O Patrick, tell me as a secret, since it is you have the best knowledge, will my dog or my hound be let in with me to the court of the King of Grace?” asks Oisín.
“Old man in your foolishness that I cannot put any bounds to, your dog or your hound will not be let in with you to the court of the King of Power,” says Patrick.
Yes, the pre-patrician old Irish were doggy people. In the long-gone words of Oisín:
If I had acquaintance with God, and my hound to be at hand, I would make whoever gave food to myself give a share to my hound as well. It was a delight to Fionn, the cry of his hounds on the mountains.
[i]Gods and Fighting Men by IA Gregory, published by John Murray, London, 1905
[ii] Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens, published by Macmillan, New York, Toronto, London, 1920
[iii]Beside the Fireside: a collection of Irish Gaelic folk stories, by Douglas Hyde (parallel texts in English and Irish), published by D Nutt, London, 1890
[iv] Bron-y-Aur stomp, from Led Zeppelin III, released by Atlantic, 1970
Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film ‘Dr Strangelove’ dramatizes the still not-altogether-remote scenario of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). It begins with a deranged U.S. Airforce General, Jack D. Ripper, overriding Executive Command and ordering a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. The Russians, unbeknownst to the Americans, have developed a deterrent – the Doomsday Machine – that automatically detonates, with devastating global effect, if a nuclear device explodes in Soviet territory.
Kubrick masterfully conveys the absurd conformism of a military organisation obeying orders to a point of self-annihilation. In the end, Major T. J. ‘King’ Kong, the B-52 commander delivering its payload, straddles the bomb, whooping as he descends to his own, and humanity’s, demise. Despite its apocalyptic message, the film remains enduringly hilarious, reflecting its alternative title: ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.’
A recent viewing in Dublin’s Lighthouse Cinema left me wondering, though, whether Kubrick derives too much comedy from an appalling vista we still confront. Laughter remains a safety valve, permitting an audience to carry on with business-as-usual, while the ultimate stupidity of nuclear war remains a real possibility. Are we, unconsciously, making light of President Donald Trump’s recent euphemistic warning of an ‘official end’ to Iran?[i] As Friedrich Nietzsche puts it: ‘in laughter all evil is compacted, but pronounced holy and free by its own blissfulness.’[ii] Regular doses of humour are one of life’s balms, but sometimes we laugh along to the exclusion of more serious engagement. Fittingly perhaps, the serious work of producing Cassandra Voices generally occurs in a studio above a crowded comedy club in the heart of Dublin, from where laughter often wafts upstairs!
If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!
Millenarian doomsday scenarios have haunted humanity since time immemorial. A ‘Great Survey’ of England and Wales in 1086, used to ascertain the proportion of the national wealth owing to King William ‘the Conqueror’ (also less flatteringly known as ‘the Bastard’), was subsequently labelled the ‘Book of Domesday’ (Middle English for ‘Doomsday’). This accumulation of data in the hands of a monarchy had terrifying connotations at a time when many perceived the end of the world, and its Final Judgment, to be nigh.
Today humanity confronts varied doomsday scenarios – generally gleaned from scientific analysis rather than metaphysical speculation – with anthropogenic climate chaos, mass extinctions and the still unresolved danger of a nuclear Armageddon topping the list. We remain in many respects, in Carl Jung’s phrase, technological savages[iii], operating machinery with capacities far exceeding our wisdom as operators. It just takes one fat finger to push the button, or an unimpeded algorithm.
But perhaps it is not nuclear warheads, or even coal-powered stations, that represent the Doomsday Machines of our time. After all, humanity could quite easily seize control of its fate, elect reasonable leaders, bring about a Green New Deal and decommission nuclear weapons. So what is holding us back from taking the action required for the benefit of the great mass of our species, and the rest of the natural world? Another mechanism, operated by most adults in developed countries, is, I believe, befuddling our wits and deterring a collective shift in consciousness.
Developed simultaneously in the early 2000s by a number of manufacturers, the smart phone is replicating the Book of Domesday by tracking our movements and online preferences to the benefit of vested commercial interests, and shadowy state emanations.
Of greater concern, perhaps, than the hollowing out of our privacy is the addiction the vast majority of us have to the narcissistic, solipsistic and often pugilistic ‘social’ media of Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat and Twitter, conveyed through apps on our smartphones. Staring into the void of communication-without-end from dawn-to-dusk, successive ‘hits’ are delivered, revealing who messages us, ‘likes’ our image or words, or offends us. Notably, Donald Trump is the acknowledged master of the soundbite Twitter update (maximum length two-hundred-and-eighty-characters), heralding the short-attention-span-politics evident in most countries.
Social media is the thief of time and an agent of homogenisation. Writing in the early twentieth century, the
Fernando Pessoa 1888-1935
Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa seemed to anticipate the contemporary malaise. ‘Given the metallic, barbarous age we live in,’ he wrote, ‘only by methodically, obsessively cultivating our abilities to dream, analyse and attract can we prevent our personality from dissolving into nothing or identical to all the others.’[iv]
The smartphone provides a simulacrum of varied technologies, such as an automated camera providing the semblance of a real one, but where the necessary application to understand the apparatus is no longer needed. The capacity to share easily what we have created has overtaken the creative process. The necessary isolation of the artist has been abandoned in favour of the instant hit of validation from our peers.
Likewise, through digital attenuation, music is debased and choice diminished when we succumb to the algorithms of Spotify and YouTube that are carried with us everywhere we go on our Doomsday Machines.
Of particular concern is a generation of teenagers who know of no other life other than that mediated by the Doomsday Machines. What is missing from their lives is the crucial ingredient of tedium, which again according to Pessoa is ‘that profound sense of the emptiness of things, out of which frustrated aspirations struggle free, a sense of thwarted longing arises and in the soul is sown the seed from which is born the mystic or the saint.’[v] Being bored can have its advantages.
I would like to say I had the willpower to renounce my own device, but as is so often the case in life, the end of the affair occurred by accident. Fiddling with its AMAZING properties, for the umpteenth time that day, as I double-jobbed playing with my young nephew, the Machine slipped from my grasp and hit a hard stone floor. The glass did not shatter exactly, except in one corner which felt the full impact, and from which a few glittery shards crumbled away. But, faintly detectable, three deathly cracks ran up from where it had landed, strangely mirroring the lifelines on my hand. When I tried to switch it on, all I found was a faint blinking light, which soon lapsed. Still looking sleek and powerful, though now veiled in a black hood of inoperativeness, it appeared to me like the corpse of a young soldier, handsome features intact, save for a bullet wound to the neck.
I felt deflated, angry and increasingly tetchy. How was I going to survive without it after a decade-long reliance? Like any addict, I felt pangs for the addled communication, information-gathering and idle scrolling that had become my early morning ritual, as I lay prostrate in bed.
As it transpired there was still some life in the Machine — I had simply smashed the screen, which I replaced at a reasonable price in a shop on Capel Street. But the liberation of a few days had changed my perspective. I had an unmistakable feeling of a great weight being lifted off me. In the meantime, I had purchased a ‘brick’ phone for next to nothing and now alternate between the two, only using the Doomsday Machine, now shorn of most, though not all, social media apps, when strictly necessary. I am a work in progress.
I know many people, more sensible than I, who have deleted all social media apps from their smartphones save for WhatsApp. This is, however, the Gateway Drug that maintains the addiction, leaving the impression that you cannot live without the Doomsday Machine. In a sinister twist, WhatsApp cannot be used on a laptop, for example, without already being connected to a Doomsday Machine.
Facebook has become the lightning rod for much of the bad press around social media – those pesky Russians again – and its distorted algorithm is a distinct nuisance if one is attempting to share meaningful content, as the cutesy image will always win out. Used strategically, however, it has its advantages, especially as a means of staying in contact with a large number of people, and for the purpose of events. It only really becomes problematic as an app on a smartphone that sends out regular notifications, prompting idly scrolling. I can live with it on my laptop, although I have given up on the hope of using it as a conduit for radical journalism.
As regards the confessional nature of posting our thoughts, I was struck by further prescient words from Pessoa: ‘What could anyone confess that would be worth anything or serve any useful purpose? What has happened to us has either happened to everyone or to us alone; if the former, it has no novelty value and if the latter it will be incomprehensible.’[vi] I am coming to recognise that most of the online outbursts I am prone to are perhaps better left unsaid.
Instagram offers a good medium for photographers to display their work, but is overwhelmingly narcissistic, not only through that ultimate expression of Doomsday Machines, the selfie, but also via the look-at-my-beautiful-life imagery that abounds. Planet Instagram is full of beautiful people who overcome life challenges, reveal plenty of tanned flesh and speak in a patois of hashtags.
Selfie by name.
Pessoa would take an uncompromising view:
Man should not be able to see his own face. Nothing is more terrible that that. Nature gave him the gift of being unable either to see his face or to look into his own eyes … he could only see his face in the waters of rivers and lakes. Even the posture he had to adopt to do so was symbolic. He had to bend down, to lower himself, in order to commit the ignominy of his seeing his own face … the creator of the mirror poisoned the human race.[vii]
There are times when access to the Internet while on the move is of great value. Google Maps makes travel immeasurably easier. But are we comfortable with all our movements being tracked? Smart-phone maps also reduce the sum total of our interactions with fellow human beings, and makes us less observant of the world around us.
A good rule of thumb is that, unless we are sitting upright, communication is unsatisfactory. The same applies to reading news sites – I had become all-too-prone to only partially reading articles. Indeed, the ‘most read’ articles on most sites tends to be prurient ‘click-bait.’
I suggest you forget about the hurried message and make time for real expression in communication. There is no point attempting to stay in touch with everyone, because it is impossible. Leave more time for reading books, making music, being present to friends and family, and allow space for the tedium that brings daydreaming.
The Internet can open new horizons of knowledge, bringing to fruition Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (d. 1716) dream of a bibliotheca universalis, a ‘universal library’, where expert insight is available to all, everywhere. It could lead us into thinking more globally. But this beast needs considerable taming. Its great potential may be more easily realised by abandoning Doomsday Machines altogether. The wider consequences of a less mediated society could be profound. If enough of us can escape the clutches of the Machines, perhaps we can eventually develop the focus required for collective action.
